Hello everyone,
with NextFest coming to a close, I'm very excited to share that the game has surpassed 1000 Wishlists!
This past week has been quite eventful, with a couple of updates, plenty of new players and some coverage on Youtube and Twitch. NextFest has been a huge boon to the visibility of the game, vastly increasing the amount of players and multiplying the number of wishlists by over 4x. If you're interested in this type of data, here are some of the more impactful numbers:
Over 780 players have launched the demo - that's nearly as many as have wishlisted! While the conversion of demo plays to wishlists is nowhere as high, since most people who visit the NextFest capsule only wishlist, I'm still very happy with this player count.
Of those players, over 200 have successfully completed the tutorial. That is more than a quarter and a higher percentage than I had expected going off the pre-NextFest distribution. This may seem like a low number but as you'll know if you've played the game, Catharage is quite niche and a bit hard to wrap your head around, so I'm actually quite pleased with this distribution.
Average playtime for the demo has decreased somewhat but is still almost 1 hour, likely explained by large outliers at the high end of playtime. What I gather from this (and have gathered in the past, when this number was much higher still) is that while few players really get into the game, those that do end up spending lots of time - a win in my book!
If you've played a significant amount of the game (I see a couple of you creeping your way up the leaderboards) and aren't yet on the Discord, I want to invite you again to join there, let me know what you think and maybe even get involved further by making suggestions or discussing the game with other members.
What does the future hold?
I'm still planning to release the game in early December of this year and am quite confident that the release date is achievable. The foundations for outstanding content are laid and solid, some of that content is already produced, and the only things that remain slightly uncertain are some of the technical and programmatic aspects related to this content. If you've read the devlog from a while ago about the Starmap and release version content structure, you'll know that three new factions, around 20 new ships and a handful of new POIs are coming. I'm also working on new systemic content like new perks and abilities, new mission types and new objectives. The majority of November will be spent hunkered down, so unless something comes up that I think is either such a fantastic idea that it deserves immediate implementation, or such a terrible bug that it requires immediate fixing, updates to the demo will also slow/stop. You can expect more Devlogs as I complete individual content packages and smaller update posts on the Discord of course.
That's all from me for now, hope you had a nice NextFest and continue to have fun with the demo!